Alan Jacobs

I think for a lot of people who don’t read pulp growing up, there’s a real surprise that the particular kind of Pulp Modernism of a certain kind of lush purple prose isn’t necessarily a failure or a mistake, but is part of the fabric of the story and what makes it weird. There’s a big default notion that “spare,” or “precise” prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it’s in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose. That adjective “precise,” for example, needs unpicking. If a “minimalist” writer describes a table, and a metaphor-ridden adjective-heavy weird fictioneer describes a table, they are very different, but the former is in absolutely no way closer to the material reality than the latter. Both of them are radically different from that reality. They’re just words. A table is a big wooden thing with my tea on it. I think they also are surprised by how much they enjoy making up monsters.

In Havel’s analysis, in other words, the basis of Communist power was consumerism. The Communist regimes were not different in kind from the West; they were merely, to borrow a phrase, the avant-garde, and Havel thought the West should consider them “a kind of warning.” In hand-to-hand combat, the dissident’s antagonist was banal greed, a force not destined to pass out of the world with the fall of the Iron Curtain. A post-totalitarian regime didn’t need to execute rebels. All it had to do was reward conformists who mouthed its empty slogans, the true meaning of which was always, “I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.” When one weighed material comforts against something as ineffable, and unpriceable, as integrity, standing up for one’s beliefs could seem like a utopian gesture—a moral luxury that was “admirable, perhaps, but quite pointless.” As Havel emphasized in his open letter to Husák, “We are all being publicly bribed.”

Books are attention machines. In web metrics, we look at average length of visit per use. I certainly remember when I was running Red Lemonade, I was struggling valiantly to get that up to ten minutes. Other content sites are probably doing the same thing, struggling valiantly for a five-minute average or a thirty-minute average. But look at the book. There isn’t an upper limit on the average time for a book. In a situation where you’re trying to get people’s attention, books are actually incredibly good at maintaining that attention. There’s a certain strand of thinking around publishing which concludes that people’s attention spans are diminishing, and consequently books should follow that diminished attention span by becoming shorter, by adding more things — by adding links, by adding video, by adding audio. That is an enormous mistake, because it is undermining books’ greatest strength, which is their ability to maintain user attention over an extended period of time by requiring the user to use his or her imagination to interpolate the video and audio. To project what those five senses would be experiencing.

Apple should take a big chunk of that money and put it into broad-reaching research and development. It should create something like DARPA, which has an annual budget of three billion dollars, or the old Xerox PARC or Bell Labs, or even like the old General Electric Research Laboratory, which in 1909 hired a brilliant young scientist named Irving Langmuir and told him to work on whatever interested him. He went on to help invent the incandescent light bulb, and he became the first industrial chemist to win the Nobel Prize. …

Whether true or not, the public eventually comes to believe that behind every great fortune lies a crime. Having a sweeping research lab, which continues to invent things that help both the company and the public, can soften a harsh reputation. That, in fact, is the model that Bell and Xerox used, more or less. They were both monopoly companies who got some slack because of all the good they did. Microsoft has created all kinds of important things through its extensive R.&D. On Monday, it announced that its research labs were releasing a product for tracking child pornography. It also has come up with FetchClimate, a research project to help climate scientists analyze massive amounts of data. People often say that Google’s pursuit of a driverless car is a sign of corporate A.D.D. Perhaps that’s true; but driverless cars could ultimately save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Margaret Wertheim’s book discusses her encounters with the natural philosophers. She is interested in them as characters in a human tragedy, with the seriousness and dignity that tragedy imposes. Her leading character is Jim Carter, and her main theme is the story of his life and work. Unlike most of the philosophical dreamers, Carter is a capable engineer and does real experiments to test his ideas. He runs a successful business that gives him leisure to pursue his dreams. He is a man of many talents, with one fatal flaw.

Carter’s flaw is his unshakable belief in a theory of the universe based on endless hierarchies of circlons. Circlons are mechanical objects of circular shape. The history of the universe is a story of successive generations of circlons arising by processes of reproduction and fission. He verified the behavior of circlons by doing experiments with smoke rings at his home. A smoke ring is a visible manifestation of a circlon. He built an experimental apparatus using garbage cans and rubber sheeting to make long-lived smoke rings under controlled conditions. The fact that smoke rings can interact with one another and maintain a stable existence proves that circlons can do the same. Just as the standard theory of nuclear physics is verified by accelerator experiments, he claims that his theory is verified by his garbage can experiments at a million times lower cost. Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, he tells his story over and over to listeners who will not believe it.

Let us begin our activism right here: with the money-driven villainy at the heart of American foreign policy. To do this would be to give up the illusion that the sentimental need to “make a difference” trumps all other considerations. What innocent heroes don’t always understand is that they play a useful role for people who have much more cynical motives. The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund. I have no opposition, in principle, to such donations (I frequently make them myself), but we must do such things only with awareness of what else is involved. If we are going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.

Success for Kony 2012 would mean increased militarization of the anti-democratic Yoweri Museveni government, which has been in power in Uganda since 1986 and has played a major role in the world’s deadliest ongoing conflict, the war in the Congo. But those whom privilege allows to deny constellational thinking would enjoy ignoring this fact. There are other troubling connections, not least of them being that Museveni appears to be a U.S. proxy in its shadowy battles against militants in Sudan and, especially, in Somalia. Who sanctions these conflicts? Under whose authority and oversight are they conducted? Who is being killed and why?

And that is what I try to do on the stage. I try to tell the truth. Not with facts, always, but informed by the facts, which are vital and necessary. I try to tell the truth, in a way that expands and ennobles it, I hope. That’s the dream. And I hope that this news cycle dies. I hope that it dies down. And I think, if I can make a compact with the press, which we’re not allowed to do. If they want to keep one person on me, (inaudible) talking about what a shitball I am, forever, if they’ll cover that fucking iPad factory story, if they’ll go back and do the work that needs doing, sitting in front of us, that we know about, that people actually care about (inaudible).

Now is the moment. And if people tell themselves that this is over because of this story, because of what I did, they’re forgetting that this would not exist in the way it does, if this story had not gotten out. If it had not gotten out, we would not have hand the emotional landscape that allowed the New York Times piece to land. You know that’s true. That doesn’t excuse me in the least, but that does me that there’s a responsibility for all of us, if you’re a journalist to pursue the story, if you’re not a journalist to read, and discuss, and talk about the issues. It’s so important. It’s so much larger than me, or the show, or anything I have ever done.

The problem, however, isn’t that we’ve grown complacent about the nature of knowledge, but that the nature of knowledge is changing in the context of networks. The vision of knowledge as paradigmatic, structured, ordered, like the hierarchy of the church and the deputations of sovereignty, was very much a product of encyclopedism’s golden age, the eighteenth century. Indeed, Diderot and his cohort sought for secular knowledge the kind of power and authority reserved for the monarchy and the magisterium of the Church. It’s a theory of knowledge in keeping with its time—although Diderot and his contemporaries already recognized the problematic nature of any single specified taxonomy of knowledge; the rule of the alphabet offered not only a handy organizing schema, but a leveling arbitrariness as well. But these means of ordering knowledge are thoroughly out of step in our own omnivalent age, which finds us suspicious of expertise, more comfortable with the iterative and approximate.

The advent of Sarah Palin, however, seemed to usher in a genuine madness that affected every inch of the political spectrum, and it brought about the blog’s second “crisis of civility.” If I found something praiseworthy in Palin, my “liberal” readers sneered and called me names. If I mildly critiqued the woman, her defensive fans became stunningly abusive. Ironically, as I tried to be both honest and fair-minded about Palin, I discovered neither left nor right could allow an assumption of good faith on my part. Perhaps projecting their passions on to me, both sides assumed that whatever I was writing about Palin was meant as a political manipulation against them. If I tried to offer balanced criticism, Palin fans accused me of “hating her from the first.” When I—because I detest bullies—defended her from an unconscionable assault by supposedly “liberal” people and the press after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, I was derided, even by progressives whom I considered real friends, as being a “secret Palin lover.”

A good-faith assumption that I simply meant the exact words I wrote, in either case, and nothing more, was not permitted. It was deemed not possible.

When we say that the word of God is not bound, we say that death itself can be the living speech of God, as the Word was uttered once and for all in the silence at the end of Good Friday. Cranmer speaks, not only in the controlled passion of those tight balances and repetitions in his Prayer Book, but in that chilling final quarter of an hour. He ran through the downpour to the town ditch and held out his right hand, his writing hand, for a final composition, a final liturgy. And, because the word of God is not bound, it is as if that hand in the flames becomes an icon of the right hand of Majesty stretched out to us for defence and mercy.